A leading influencer, Italian Isabella Potí earned her first Michelin star aged only 24 at the Bros restaurant (Lecce, Salento) she runs with her partner, Floriano Pellegrino, offering an update of the most traditional flavours of her native soil, the south of Puglia, Italy's "heel", to show them off to the world. At Féminas the young chef explained the enormous importance of women in her neck of the woods, where they have always been in charge of farm work and domestic kitchens.

Potí trained alongside grand masters such as Claude Bosi in London, Paco Torreblanca and Martín Berasategui in Spain, and Mauro Colagreco in France, and explained by videoconference that "in Salento women have always been responsible for conveying culinary culture, because they have always managed the "masserie", Italy's old self-sufficient farmsteads that produced all the food used to feed the family, something which is tremendously relevant, because in those days it was a choice between autarchy or death", she claims. This meant that women had to monitor climatology and keep ahead of the seasons, in order to produce in accordance with nature, and to help their families survive.

This tradition of leadership prevented Isabella from growing up with any feelings of gender inequality. “Even though it's still quite a male-dominated sector, we’ve made a lot of progress, and nowadays a large number of women are running the kitchen at restaurants. I've never noticed the difference during my career, and that's where my strength lies, because I didn't allow it to lock me out", she claims, and she always advises women starting out in the profession to do likewise. “We can't simply think that it's tougher for us because we're women; it's tough for everyone."

Showing the flavours of her region to the world

Isabella is a genuine celebrity in Italy, helped along by her stints on Masterchef and other TV appearances, in addition to a book, “Millennial Cooking”. In the commercial sector her major acknowledgement was a Michelin star for her restaurant Bros to showcase her manifest cookery talents. “We're contemporary chefs", she said, since she combines her work as a chef with other businesses such as fashion and a rugby team.

“At Bros we use the most traditional local produce in our haute cuisine, with an update of flavours that people would not pick up on, to show them to the world", she explained, and cited the example of "ricosttante", a salted fermentate from the milk left over from ricotta cheese, which has a rather musty taste she has compared to cured ham. Isabella and Floriano use this genuine article from their region for a very special recipe based on mackerel, a local fish which lacks punch in haute cuisine.